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Other Titles

BOOKS BY AMY JONES

What Boys Like (2009)

We’re All in This Together (2016)

Title Page

Copyright

Copyright © 2016 by Amy Jones

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Jones, Amy, 1976–, author

We’re all in this together / Amy Jones.

ISBN 978-0-7710-5064-0 (paperback). – ISBN 978-0-7710-5066-4 (epub)

I. Title.

PS8619.O525W47 2016             C813’.6             C2016-901300-6

C2016-901301-4

Cover design: Kelly Hill

Cover images: © Dorling Kindersley / Getty Images

Cast of characters (pancakes): © VectorPainter / Shutterstock.​com

eBook ISBN 9780771050664

This is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, and locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

McClelland & Stewart,

a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited,

a Penguin Random House Company

v4.1

a

Dedication

For my sister, Erin Jones.

I’m sorry I told all the neighbourhood kids

you were left on our doorstep by aliens.

Friday

ONE

His eyes remind Finn of cola – deep, caramel brown, fizzing with bubbles that burst at the surface. He has Prince Charles’s ears and a mole on the left side of his jaw, but he is tall and lanky, the type of guy who gets a lot of “Play any basketball?” and hates it because he never played basketball, just hockey, and never as well as he wanted to. Finn knows he’s married before he even crosses the bar to talk to her, all arms and legs in a suit, shimmying between the sweaty after-workers in their four-beer euphoria leaning back precariously in their wooden chairs. Something about the way he walks, it’s clear he has a back-up plan: he can go home to someone else if he really has to. Not that it matters to Finn – she just needs someone to help her make up for lost time. She has until nine the next morning, when her plane takes her home to Thunder Bay, to transform her life into something she’s not acutely ashamed of.

Finn is with some co-workers from the marketing department she barely knows, four women who invite the whole company out for drinks every Friday, never thinking anyone outside of their clique is going to take them up on it. But Finn knew it was the only invitation she was going to get, and she couldn’t just sit at home all night freaking out about her family and the goddamn Conqueror of Kakabeka. The marketing women are all day-to-night with their blazers slipped off to reveal sleeveless silk blouses, with fresh lipstick and powdered noses, their hair unpinned and falling around their jutting collarbones as they sip their martinis. Finn drinks her third double rum and Coke in her jeans and T-shirt, trying to remember what it was like to not work from home, to have to talk to colleagues in person and make a good impression. When she was still working at the office she had been intimidated by these marketing women and their sharp tongues and high cheekbones, their expensive shoes, their ability to hold their liquor. She tried to be like them, to exude effortless, sexy professionalism, to be brave and charming and confident. It didn’t work, of course. She was still just Finn, only in nicer clothes.

She has explained to the marketing women that she has to make an emergency trip home, and when she tells them where “home” is, they vow to get her nice and wasted so she can have something to remember fondly when she’s stuck in the middle of nowhere. Just from the pitying way they soften their eyes, Finn knows they are all Toronto born and bred, that they can’t even conceive of a place unreachable by public transit.

“Seriously, Fiona,” says one of the women, leaning across the table. It’s not until she touches Finn’s arm that Finn realizes she is talking to her. “Are you going to be okay up there?” Finn thinks the woman’s name might be Bianca, but the others just call her B.

“It’s northern Ontario, not North Korea,” one of the other women says.

“Shut up, Carrie,” B says. “It might as well be North Korea. Don’t they have weapons of mass destruction hidden somewhere in North Bay?”

“It’s actually Thunder Bay,” Finn says. “Completely different bay.” They all stare at her blankly. To them, “up north” means “cottage country,” and anything beyond that is like another planet.

“Well, here’s something that will cheer you up,” Carrie says, pulling out her phone. “Have you seen that Conqueror of Kakabeka video?”

Finn feels her rum and Coke rising up in her esophagus. She swallows it down and excuses herself to go up to the bar – slipping away from the table unnoticed as the marketing women all crowd around Carrie’s phone, their eyes wide with the delicious anticipation of watching a catastrophe unfold – and wedges herself onto a barstool. Breathe, she tells herself. Just breathe. And that’s when he comes over, this walking distraction in a suit. She smiles at him, and he smiles back.

“Can I buy you a drink?” he asks.

“You could,” she says, her hand snaking along the bar towards his arm. “Or we could just go back to my place and drink for free.”

She has no idea where that comes from, but it works – it’s so easy, in fact, that she can’t believe she hasn’t done it before. They take a cab from the bar to her house and he pays as Finn stumbles out into the humid summer night, over-tipping the driver, grinning at him with some kind of misguided sense of camaraderie, all boys will be boys with undertones of please don’t tell, like the cab driver gives a fuck what they’re doing.

He doesn’t ask her name, but when they get to her place he stops to scrutinize her bookshelf while she searches her bathroom for a condom, which suddenly seems so intrusive, as if everything he needs to know about her is right there in front of him, catalogued and arranged in alphabetical order. As if with the right interpretive tools, her books could be parsed to reveal the complete inner workings of her psyche. As if her collection of dogeared Agatha Christie paperbacks says it all: Spinster. Loner. Nerd.

She pulls him away from the bookcase and they tumble from room to room with the lights out, bumping into furniture and hurling themselves into the bedroom like they’re crossing a finish line. When his phone rings, he shuts it off without even checking the caller ID. Shoves it back in his pocket and moves in to kiss Finn’s neck, but not before she catches a glimpse of his background image, a black lab with a Frisbee in his mouth, eyeing the camera warily. At least it’s not a baby, some blond-haired cherub staring at her accusingly from the screen, maybe a mother’s face hovering somewhere above. Thinking about this imaginary woman, this imaginary child, Finn seethes with resentment for how willing he is to throw all of that away for a sexual experience that was going to be, let’s be honest, barely memorable for either of them.

“What’s wrong?” he asks, pulling back suddenly, and Finn realizes she is clenching every muscle in her body. “I’m sorry, do you not…”

“It’s fine,” she says, forcing herself to relax, to make the required noises and facial expressions.

In bed he’s like a teenaged boy, awkward and desperate, pawing at her hooks and clasps until everything pops open just by sheer force of will, finished before Finn has even started. And it’s as if everything she needs to know about him is right there, as if the way he bites down on her clavicle says it all. His wife, once a long-legged sixteen-year-old, now slack-waisted and baby-weary, was his first, possibly his only; he has never cheated before because he’s never been presented with the opportunity. Finn made things effortless for him, and now a part of this unremarkable man will always be hers. Unremarkable Man, like some kind of lame superhero, with the power to make you forget him the instant he walks out the door.

Unremarkable Man falls asleep immediately, and Finn gets up, puts on a pair of shorts, and sits on the front stoop with a cigarette and a glass of Malbec. She checks her phone: 5 a.m. Her flight home is in four hours. Funny, how she still considers Thunder Bay “home” after all these years away. It’s just a word, she tells herself, it doesn’t mean anything. But she knows that’s not true. She loves words too much to believe it.

On her street, people are getting up to walk the dog, take the kids to swimming practice, head to cardio boot camp. The sky is still black, pierced with only a few of the brightest, pluckiest stars. And even though this is one of the things Finn usually loves about living in the suburbs, tonight it’s like those few stars are laughing, winking their luminous and condescending plasma-filled eyes at her.

She clutches her legs tightly to her chest, tipping back the wine from the glass wedged between her knees. She doesn’t light the cigarette. Fuck you, stars, she thinks. Fuck you for thinking you’re the only ones who can harness the power of gravity to hold yourself together. Fuck you for thinking you’re so much better than me. Why don’t you get off your hundreds-of-light-years-away asses and come down here and say it to my face. Why don’t you come down here and watch me nucleosynthesize when I go supernova. Why don’t you come down here and watch me fucking explode.

—

The first call had come at ten that morning, while Finn was sitting outside with her coffee on the back steps of her townhouse, watching Max the golden retriever run around in the yard.

“Ms. Parker?” a husky female voice asked. “I’m glad I caught you at home.”

Finn sighed. One of the perils of working from home is that you’re always at home. “Who is this?” she asked.

“My name is Cassandra Coelho. I’m a reporter with Thunder Bay News. I was wondering if I could ask you some questions about your mother.”

Finn felt something like an electric shock spark in her brain. “My mother? Why?”

There was the sound of paper rustling. “You are Serafina Parker, right? From Thunder Bay?” Cassandra Coelho paused. “Your mother is Katherine Parker? The Conqueror of Kakabeka?”

“My…The what?”

“How is she doing? Is there any word on her condition? We’d love to talk to her when she comes out of the coma.”

Panic crashed over Finn as she tried to process what she was hearing. Her mother, in a coma. This much Finn could understand, the words lining up with their proper meaning, an entire library of reference points tumbling out of her mental archive. Coma, noun: A state of deep unconsciousness that lasts for an indefinite period, from the Greek kōma, meaning “deep sleep.” The rest, she had no idea. She hadn’t been home to Thunder Bay in over three years, hadn’t spoken to her mother in probably six months, with the exception of a few brief emails, which meant months and months of blanks she couldn’t fill in. It had been working for her. As long as she filled her days with the present, then the past didn’t exist – she could pretend she just sprang fully formed from the earth, or just willed herself into being all on her own. But now it was cracking open, this entire potential world of things Finn didn’t know. On the other side of the yard, Max chased his tail, and Finn watched him, mesmerized, as he turned around and around, her own brain spinning along with him.

“Ms. Parker?”

“No comment,” Finn mumbled and hung up. There were choices to make now, courses of action to decide on – it was almost as though she could see them all, playing out in front of her like movies overlapping on a screen. She picked the only one she could handle.

Her brother, Shawn, answered on the seventh ring, out of breath and annoyed.

“What the hell is going on?” she asked.

“Oh. Finn.” Shawn said her name as though he’d just remembered her existence. When was the last time she’d talked to him? Two weeks ago? Eight? “Can I call you back? It’s not a good time.”

Finn made a fist and jammed it into her thigh to keep from screaming. “Not a good time? I just found out my mother is in a coma from a fucking reporter.”

“I was going to call you.”

“Of course you were,” said Finn. “I’m sure I was at the very top of your list of priorities.”

Shawn sighed. “I just got to the hospital. I have to find someone to cover for me at the restaurant. And I still have to figure out who’s going to pick up the kids.” Shawn’s boys were named Tommy and Petey. That way, Shawn always said, when they were grown-ups they could be Thomas and Peter. And then when they were old men, they could be Tom and Pete. Their names could be modified to fit any stage of life. Finn imagines Shawn likes this because Shawn was just Shawn, you couldn’t even make a nickname out of it except for maybe Shawny, which sounded less like a person and more like a town or a piece of farm equipment.

Shawn’s wife’s name was Katriina. No one ever called her anything but Katriina.

“First you need to tell me what’s going on,” Finn said. She started pacing the yard, the too-long grass prickling her bare feet. “The reporter said something about Kakabeka Falls?”

“Yeah.” In the background, she could hear a tinny voice droning over a loudspeaker, an unintelligible din that Shawn practically had to yell over. “She went over.”

“She…went over?”

“The falls, Finn. She went over the fucking falls.”

“Oh my god. When?” asked Finn, hoping to hell it wasn’t two days ago, two weeks ago, two months ago.

“This morning.”

The droning stopped. In the resulting quiet, Finn could hear her own heart firing off in her chest. “She got caught in the current?” she asked hopefully. But somewhere inside her, she knew what the answer was.

“No.” Finn heard the sound of a door closing. “Kate went over the falls on purpose,” Shawn said, his voice low.

And there it was. “How do you know?”

There was a long pause. “She was in a barrel,” Shawn said. “One of Hamish’s,” he added, as if it made any difference whose barrel it was.

Finn sat back down on the step. She had a sudden, sharp memory of her mother, years ago, standing in her kitchen on Victor Street, talking about something she had seen on television. Annie Edson Taylor, that was it, a sixty-three-year-old woman who was the first person to go over Niagara Falls and survive. Finn remembered Kate sighing, gazing out the window at a far-off place in history that seemed so much prettier from a distance, saying, “I don’t know. Doesn’t it just seem like there’s nothing left to be first at these days?”

“Finn?” said Shawn. “Are you still there?”

How would a normal person react to this news? What would someone else’s daughter say? Finn took a sip of coffee and swallowed it before she realized it had gone cold. On the other side of the yard, Max was having a stand-off with a squirrel in a pine tree. She couldn’t see the squirrel but she could hear it chattering away, taunting him. “Well, is she going to be okay?” Finn asked finally.

“No, she’s not going to be okay, Finn. She’s in a coma.” Shawn paused. “You need to come back to Thunder Bay. You need to come home.”

Finn closed her eyes. “I don’t think I can.”

“Why?”

“You know why.”

Shawn sighed. “Come on, Finn, it’s been three years. Grow up.”

She wished she was on a cell phone and not the cordless, so she could pretend that the call had been dropped. Shawn still talked to her as if she were a teenager, even though he was only four years older. He wasn’t even her real brother. He was just some street kid who hopped trains and sold drugs and lived in a tent in the woods behind the house where she grew up – until the day he stopped the family car from crushing Kate after she forgot to put on the emergency brake and it started rolling down the driveway towards her. After that, he started sleeping in their basement. “We could use a man around the house while your father’s away,” Kate had said to Finn and her twin sister, Nicki, winking at the scrawny kid with a forehead full of pimples and the ratty beginnings of a moustache, as though he could actually be mistaken for a man. “You know, someone to look after us girls.” Her mother’s idea of irony, Finn supposed. None of them had ever needed looking after. Not then.

“You need to look after us girls,” Finn said under her breath.

“What?” Shawn said.

“Nothing.” Years later, she found out that the only reason Shawn had been there to save Kate is because he was trying to steal propane from their barbecue so he could do hot knives with a blowtorch. “How’s Dad taking it?” she asked.

“Walter’s out on the lake with a research team. He won’t be back for a couple of days.” Shawn paused again. “Nicki’s pretty upset, though, in case you wanted to know.”

“Right,” said Finn, rolling her eyes. “She still in rehab for that toe?”

“Oh my god, get over yourself, Finnie.”

In the background, Finn suddenly heard Katriina, clear as her own thoughts, say, “Who’s Finnie?” Katriina was from Finland – which Finn used to think of as her land until she met Katriina and realized it would never be anything but Katriina’s land, even though Katriina has lived in Canada for most of her life. Sometimes Finn suspects Katriina just pretends to not understand what people are saying in order to seem more exotic.

“Serafina,” said Shawn, muffling the phone to keep Finn from hearing Katriina’s response.

Finn tucked the phone between her ear and her shoulder and walked across the yard to clip the leash to Max’s collar. The backyard was fenced, but Max, while in a particularly focused state, had been known to fly right over it. “I can’t just drop everything and come back,” she said to the muffled phone. “I have stuff going on.”

“What stuff?” Shawn asked.

“Stuff.” She had no stuff, of course. She worked from home. She didn’t have a boyfriend, a sex life, or even a social life. Max wasn’t even her dog – she just took care of him for her neighbour, Dave, a divorced plumber with every-second-weekend kids and a Charger up on blocks in his backyard. She didn’t even have any plants to water.

“You are coming home, Finn,” Shawn said. She could hear the Shawn-ness in his voice. He might as well have called her “young lady.” “Kate will wake up, and she will need you. She’s not doing good, Finnie.”

Finn shaded her eyes, searching the tree’s branches for the squirrel. She finally spotted it, halfway up, nibbling delicately on a pine cone, which it promptly hurled in Max’s general direction. “Superman does good,” Finn said. It was one of her favourite expressions, which also might explain why she had no friends.

Max took off towards the squirrel like a sprinter at the starting gun, so fast that he ripped the leash from her hands. The phone tumbled to the ground. The squirrel tore farther up the tree and bounded lightly to a power line, and then was gone. When Finn picked up the phone again, Shawn was gone, too. Max trotted over to her, tongue hanging out, unfazed by his defeat, and licked her hand.

“Mom does well,” Finn said to him. Although even Max knew it wasn’t true.

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